by Shelley Odradek
January 19th - February 5th
Opening Reception: Postponed due to weather
Shelley will be in the gallery from 4-5pm every Friday and Saturday for the duration of the exhibition if you'd like to visit!
Virtual Artist Talk: January 27th, 6pm - Zoom Link
As digital artist-in-residence at the University of North Carolina Greensboro, we were given the opportunity to work with two distinct groups who were exploring two distinct subjects. Through this work, the core theme that emerged is cloud (chmura), in its full spectrum of physical and conceptual meanings. Notions of sharpness and the ‘poor image’, as described by Hito Steyerl, and the relation between power and clarity, high resolution and high value, were introduced through “Digital Darkroom”, a digital image-making course where we were also introduced to the notion of ‘fake’, and the ways in which we tell stories visually through image abstraction+extraction. Through “Mapping Dance” we were working with the physical body. We asked what are the movements, gestures, positions, abstractions, sounds and stories of our bodies, our families, our cultures, our histories? How do we dance when we are a communal body, what are the gestures and performances of identity when the border of the body is blurred, when the border of the body is behind/on the other side of a screen? How does a disembodied self move, how does a fragmented/glitched/error-ed body dance?
This exhibition represents the work that occurred before and through our collective work at the University of North Carolina Greensboro. And you, our dear visitors, guests, readers, and challengers, are also now a part of the constellation that is Shelley Odradek. You are invited to engage with these questions and ideas in the way that feels most comfortable for you. This is not a project but rather a proposition for co-authorship; to stretch the boundaries of self, of collectivity, of what it means to be simultaneously on the outside and inside, to be everywhere and nowhere, together.
Shelley Odradek is a communal, metamorphosing, internet-based identity. Through Shelley we work collectively to explore connection, digital_social ethics, power dynamics, performance of the self, liminality, and to re-dimensionalize flattened binary conceptions. We engage with our communities via the internet and represent a continually blurred border from where we contemplate the overlaps between people and place, culture and community. We acknowledge the need to apply more than one model in order to succeed in re-learning trust, intimacy, care, kindness, kinship, and connection, and favor repositioning existing strategies over invention for the sake of the new. With a background in architecture, psychoanalysis, contemporary art, border-crossing, garden-tending, and community-building, we use these fluid spaces as the starting point for reflection on both new and perennial questions that revolve around the structures of contemporary life that we employ personally, collectively, publicly and privately, and how we perform them.
Ola Andrzejewska is interested in the intersection of different disciplines: philosophy, art, ecology, architecture and activism, and creating cross-border collaborations between them. Andrzejewska is the co-founder of SAM Rozkwit and Onward, Allotments [Naprzód Działki], with the goal of protecting allotment gardens in the city of Warsaw, increasing public access and facilitating dialogues between allotment owners and local communities. Ola has her master's degree in Architecture and Urbanism (University of Technology in Gdańsk) and in Culture, Media and Society (GSSR, PAN Warsaw). She is currently pursuing her doctoral degree on the psychoanalytic theory of the art of Melanie Klein and Hanna Segal. She is a member of the ‘Center for Psychoanalytic Thought’, a platform for engagement for those interested in the theory and practice of psychoanalysis and its influence on various realms of the humanities.
Katie Zazenski is an American artist, curator, writer, lecturer, and director of the Warsaw-based independent art space Stroboskop. Often working collaboratively, her research is focused on interconnectedness, hybrid structure and human connection through body-object relations. Her work has been included in exhibitions at public and private institutions including the San Diego Art Institute (CA, USA), the Zachęta National Gallery of Art (PL), the Center for Contemporary Art in Warsaw, and the Contemporary Art Center in Vilnius (LT). In 2020, she joined the editorial team at BLOK Magazine (PL) where she hosts a monthly column featuring the community of non-institutional spaces in Eastern+Central Europe, she is also a contributing writer. Zazenski received her MFA in Sculpture from the Cranbrook Academy of Art (MI, USA) and is a two-time Fulbright Fellow to Poland where she is currently based.
